Check yourself out. Stick your name into a couple of search engines and see what surfaces. Look on newsgroups and photo sites as well — maybe your ex did make good on her threat to post that shot of you wearing nothing but mud and a naughty smile. And check that any profiles on dating sites or places such as Friends Reunited are professional rather than saucy, advises careerjournal.com.

Swamp the bad bits. lf your web trawl nets you a horror (your brief dalliance with nipple piercing, say), try asking the site’s owner to take it down. It might work. More likely it won’t. In this case, your best bet is to stick loads of positive news about yourself online in an effort to push the bad bits down search engines’ lists, says www.careerjournal.com.

Be honest. With the growth of the internet it is increasingly easy to get caught out if you inflate your qualifications or overstate your professional responsibilities, says Andy Randall, the CEO of i-GRasp, the e-recruitment company. “Over time these things will almost certainly be online.”

Bloggers can be choosers. In your CV you claim to be a supportive boss, but an ex-employee’s blog refers to you as an evil old cow. What will the recruiter believe? It’s hard to get the blog changed; instead, use the criticism as a spur for some self-examination, Randall says.

Add a bit extra. “CVs are very limited ways of expressing your individuality,” Randall says. Set up a website that will help googling recruiters to learn about your charity work or the time your team won University Challenge. You could even consider adding links to an online CV.

Prepare now. Randall says that few recruiters routinely check candidates’ online credentials at the moment, but he expects that to change this year. “It’s in its infancy at the moment. Twelve months from now it will be a significant factor in the recruitment process,” he says.

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